I was not planning on sharing this recipe but the richness of the fizzified shiso and the color of this beaut swayed me to share. This was a backup soda that I tested for an upcoming fermentation dinner I’m doing (very exciting!) with Food Underground,* but after just a couple test batches I’m a convert.

If you read this blog or have taken soda classes with me in the past, you probably know that I grow and love purple shiso. I think it adds that je ne sais quoi to my potluck soda offerings and to many other ferments. And while all sodas are not probiotic, not even all fermented ones, this one is made with kefir whey, so it is. For a vegan or dairy-free version, try using something like this fermented bulgur liquid or finished water kefir or coconut water kefir in place of kefir whey, but do be aware that they have the potential to impact the flavor more than the relatively neutral tasting kefir whey.

As for plums, I like to use a sweet/tart plum variety for soda. Santa Rosa plums are my favorite (I will admit that it’s in part because they’re GORGEOUS), but just about any plum will do. Go for purple or red varieties to get that bright red hue.

Plum Shiso Soda Recipe

Yield: 4 liters

This soda will age nicely (and eventually become wine) in the fridge, however remember that any time you’re bottling without measuring the conversion of sugar into alcohol (and especially when you’re intentionally leaving fermentable sugars in there for carbonation and sweetness), there is a risk of explosion. Explosions are not a joke, and exploding glass bottles are seriously dangerous. For that reason, I always bottle soda in plastic bottles. Recycled two liters are excellent vessels, and they’re intended to keep the carbonation trapped, so they’re less prone to explosions and leaks, and more apt to give you a delightfully bubbly soda. I soak mine overnight with soapy water to get the flavors of the soda out of the vessel, and then rinse thoroughly with cool water to get the soap out.

Do take care when opening fermented sodas. There are plenty of sugars left to ferment when you bottle, so they’ll geyser if you let them!

Equipment

1-gallon or larger crock or open container**

Long wooden or plastic spoon

Fine- or medium-mesh strainer

Funnel

Two 2 liter bottles that seal well enough to trap carbonation (see headnote)

Ingredients

2 pounds plums (seconds are great for this!)

1/2 cup packed shiso leaves (okay to leave the stems on)

2 cups cane sugar (or more to taste)

8 cups filtered water, plus more to fill bottles

1/2 cup kefir whey

2/3 cup lemon juice (or more to taste)

How-to

Put plums into a 1-gallon or larger vessel and toss with sugar. Allow to macerate for an hour or so, until the plums are steeping their own juice. Add shiso and toss it all together. Pour in 8 cups of filtered water, kefir whey and lemon juice. If you overfill your vessel, you’ll be quite unhappy later, so try to keep it to about half full.

Using a long and strong wooden or plastic spoon, stir vigorously, creating a tornado-like vortex in the center of your container. If you overfilled, this is when you’ll feel it: when the contents of your crock spill out onto the countertops. Stirring is an incredibly important step. At this stage, the yeast want oxygen to be active and replicate, and stirring is how you give them that air supply. Continue stirring as vigorously and as frequently as you can, a minimum of twice a day. The more you stir, the sooner your ferment will become active and the sooner you get to drink it!

Cover the container with a kitchen cloth and rubber band. At this stage, you want air in, but no dust or passing buggies. Depending on temperature, how frequently and vigorously you stir, how fresh your kefir whey was and how concerned you are with alcohol content (shorter fermentation for less booze), you’ll continue stirring and recovering for 12 hours to 3 days.

When the plums and shiso have risen to surface and you see a lot of bubbling when you stir, you’re almost ready for bottling. Strain out the plums and shiso and reserve for another use or compost. Taste the liquid with a clean spoon (don’t double dip). If it needs a bit more acid, add some lemon juice, a tablespoon at a time. If it’s not quite sweet enough after those first, sugar-devouring days of fermentation, add a bit more sugar (1/4 to 1/2 cup is the most I ever add).

Stir to incorporate additional sugar and lemon juice and then split the mix evenly between your two bottles. Add filtered water to the bottles until they are full to about 3 inches from the top. Secure the lids and set them in a room temperature spot away from direct sunlight.

Once the bottle has become rigid (test by squeeze the sides), you know it’s carbonated. The timing on this will depend on a few things (like temperature), so it could be anywhere from 8 to 24 hours later. In the winter, it can take a few days. Chill it in the fridge for at least an hour before opening.

Open with care! My kitchen ceiling is permanently strawberry soda-stained, and there’s no reason for that to happen to you.

Long term storage in the fridge is not recommended because explosions are a thing, even in plastic!

I wrote a while ago about making water kefir using milk kefir grains. When made that way it’s not suitable for strict vegans, and it risks the health of the grains, but in a pinch it will do the trick. I recently broke down and bought some real water grains, because of a certain someone. A man. And I’m not talking about my (basically perfect) husband.

I’ve been holding out on you, dear reader. I never told you about Dom. If you are any kind of kefir veteran, you already know Dom. If you’re new to fermenting, or kefir, maybe you aren’t familiar, but I think you are about to be as in love as I am. I myself have never met Dom, but love is not too strong a word. Why? Because he has apparently devoted a significant portion of his life to some pretty rigorous experimentation surrounding my very favorite culture, kefir. Furthermore, he shares the results of all of his efforts with the rest of us for free on his site.

It might not be love at first site for you. Maybe you like your urls to be shorter than 23 words. Okay. Maybe you prefer the simple color schemes that websites have developed in the last decade to two decades to the wild and crazy color choices of the 90s internet. I hear you. But I love Dom just how he is (and I think if you have a problem with that stuff I just mentioned, you’ll get over it once you see what the man has to offer).

I have used Dom’s site (Dom’s kefir in-site, to be exact) as a resource for milk kefir for quite some time. And it was Dom who finally convinced me to take the plunge and get some water kefir (or as he calls them, sugar kefir) grains. It was seduction, pure and simple. I was pouring over some of his milk kefir info for the 29th time when I decided to take a peek, just a tiny scroll, into water territory. Just to see. And what a slippery slope it was. It’s too sweet, I thought. I’m satisfied with what I have. I have other cultures in my life. They deserve my time and loyalty. A glance become a look and then I was staring, and their translucent sugar-munching bodies suddenly held an appeal they’d never had before. It was like I was seeing them for the first time. Dom’s fantastic explanations of increasing growth rate, best flavoring practices and secondary fermentation strategy put my mind in a dither and before I knew what I was happening, I’d printed out my order form and mailed it off to the always wonderful GEM.

Now here I am a couple months later not enjoying exactly daily batches of the sweet stuff, but it definitely enters into our weekly repertoire. The sugars you put in are converted not just to CO2 and alcohol, but also to fructose*, which is why water kefir retains such a sweet taste even after fermentation is complete. From a health standpoint, this is still a decent dose of sugar. But if you are, for instance, a person trying to kick a soda habit, water kefir might just be your perfect transition.

You can get more than enough amazing info from Dom’s site, and I highly suggest you do, but in the meantime, I’ll share my very simple process with you. Just know that everything I do right is thanks to Dom and any errors are my own.

A note on grains: neither water kefir nor milk kefir grains are actually grains. They are most likely called grains due to their granular appearance, but in reality they are cultures made up of bacteria and yeast (or SCOBYs, if you will) that contain no grain at all.

Some close up grains

Water Kefir

THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE EXCELLENT ADVICE THAT CAME FROM YEMOOS.

Makes 1 quart

Unlike milk kefir grains, water kefir grains sink to the bottom. So although this is a process of anaerobic (airless) fermentation, you don’t really need a sealing container. I like to use a container that seals because it makes the final product fizzier, like a pro-biotic pop, even if I don’t do secondary fermentation. When you put your kefir in a sealed container, you definitely want to leave a few inches of space at the top, and you want to check in and burp it at least every 12 hours. In a long-neck bottle, don’t fill the neck (and burp). Your grains are creating CO2 and that can cause explosions. This is also why you don’t want to let your container ferment for much longer than two days, and why, even once it’s in the fridge, you need to open it up every so often to let that CO2 escape. Although this has never happened to me, it is a real risk to be aware of.

Ingredients

3 cups of filtered water

4 tablespoons cane sugar of your choice (processed sugars are okay, but honey is a no-no due to its antibacterial properties)

Let it sit at room temperature for up to 48 hours. Sucrose is generally consumed by 24 hours.

Strain out your fruit and compost it.

Strain out your kefir grains with a non-metallic mesh strainer, rinse with filtered water and put them into fresh sugar solution to repeat process. You may also choose to store them in the fridge in filtered water or in a fresh sugar solution (using the proportions in this recipe) for up to a week before making your next batch.

If you like your drinks extra fizzy, put your finished, strained water kefir into a container that seals, such as a swingtop bottle and let it sit at room temp for 1-2 days more. You can also add all varieties of flavorings once your kefir grains are removed. Apple and grape juice, coconut water and vanilla beans are all great choices that yield excellent results. BE VERY CAREFUL AT THIS STEP. EXPLOSIONS FROM WATER KEFIR SEEM TO BE THE MOST COMMON EXPLOSIONS. IF YOU ARE BOTTLING IN GLASS, BE ESPECIALLY CAREFUL!!!

Stick it in the fridge or cold storage to let it chill before serving. Store in fridge for as long as it continues to taste good to you. For most people it becomes too acidic after 2-3 weeks.

Special thanks to Mari Jaye Blanchard for the lovely photos in this post.

I absolutely love fermenting (shocked, aren’t you?). I’ve made quite a few ferments and I make a few things all the time but until a couple months ago I only used things I already had in my kitchen to make a wide variety of ferments (with the exception of a $2 fine-mesh strainer that I purchased from my local kitchen supply store a couple years back).

To anyone who feels intimidated by fermentation and afraid to invest in expensive equipment, I say DON’T. Don’t feel intimidated. Don’t invest in equipment. You don’t need it to get started. For many ferments, you don’t even need it to delve deep.

Here are many of the things that I use on my daily fermentation quests:

Glass Bowls – Very handy for sourdough and brining. For brining my kimchi veggies, I use several of my largest bowls. I have one very large bowl into which a plate fits perfectly. I use that for lactopickles and fruit chunk vinegars, among other things. I must admit that I entertain a lot, so I already had a larger number of glass bowls than the average city-dweller probably does.

Wooden Spoons – Since metal can damage some kinds of cultures (I’m looking at you kefir grains and scobys) I use wooden, plastic or silicone utensils on all of my ferments, just to maintain the habit. I have a variety of wooden spoons that I use for different containers. The long guy (or as my honorary second mother calls it, the “stupid spoon”) is very useful for those giant pots full of stuff and for compressing things (like preserved lemons) into large, half-gallon and gallon jars.

The Stupid Spoon doing one of its many important jobs, dissolving sugar

Chopsticks – Although we mostly cook at home and eat a healthy , it is impossible to live in Philly and not sometimes enjoy a little Han Dynasty or Golden Empress. As a non-hoarding hoarder, I love that my beloved kefir grains give me an excuse to save chopsticks for years. I use them to stir my kefir while it’s straining. Speeds the process up quite a bit.

Jars of Many Sizes – I have a lot of jars. I’ve saved everything from hot sauce to olive and spice jars for a very long time, to my non-hoarding husband’s great dismay. Having jars of different sizes around is a great boon for fermenters. Although not always the ideal vessel for most ferments, they are great for submerging things like small batches of lactopickles or kimchi in larger jars when you want liquid covering your veggies. Look for tomorrow’s post on my cheapo jar method for creating the right environment for lactic veggie fermentation.

Plastic lids – The typical lids that come with Ball jars are metal and can definitely corrode during and after fermentation. You aren’t heat-sealing your jars anyway, so switching to plastic lids for things like kefir and preserved citrus is a great idea.

Kitchen towels, Cloth Napkins, Coffee Filters – These guys all serve the same purpose but I use them for different things. When you need to release the fermentation bubbles, but not let in flies or other beasties, merely cover your fermentation vessel with one of these guys. I use them all for different things. Obviously the coffee filters are the least versatile since they can only be used with jars and smaller containers and they are the least reusable of the bunch. The one advantage they have is that they don’t cover any part of your jar below the thread, so you have full visibility. Towels I use with large bowls, and to insulate bowls and jars that need a slightly higher temperature. My cloth napkins are many-hued, so I can use them to color-code things (I’m a nerd). The other advantage of towels and napkins is that they are absorbent, so when your cup inevitably runneth over, you don’t end up with salt lick of a table.

A kitchen towel protecting a small batch of cider vinegar from the hell of infestation

Glass Pitchers – Good for ferments that like air to get where they’re going, such as vinegar. In the case of kombucha, you’ll need something with no metal parts, and a lovely glass pitcher can totally fit the bill.

Leftover (scavenged) two liters – Carbonation. When making natural sodas or anything else you want carbonating but not exploding shards of glass into your precious, precious eyes it helps to have some old two-liters around. Women carrying recycled coca-cola bottles filled with thick, foamy chica away from the local chicheria is a common site in the Sacred Valley of Peru. And they know their stuff. The great thing is that you know when they are fully pressurized because the bottles become hard. Then it’s time to stick them in the fridge.

Sealable glass bottles – I use recycled 360 Vodka bottles when I’m doing a very short fermentation and I need it super bubbly. I cannot recommend that you do the same, since you are intentionally cultivating pressure which could lead to explosion. I have never had this happen to me, but I have

Recycled sealing bottle. Beware of possibility of glass explosion. I can’t explain why my hand looks like a ham in this picture.

Leftover produce rubber bands – Never throw these away again! Rubber bands of all shapes and sizes are useful for securing coverings (see above) to your fermentation vessels. I especially treasure the gigantic ones that are wrapped 4 times around my broccoli stalks, but the smaller, tighter ones are great for smaller containers as well.

I have recently added some actual equipment to fermenting library, but that is after years of fermenting with nothing more than the things in my house. While I’m sure there are other household things that I regularly use to ferment, these are the first to jump to mind. Crazy, right? Insane, the amount of cash I had to spend to get this bubbling.*

If you’re a noob: see, you can do this! I promise!

If you’re an old pro: what household items do you use for your ferments? Tell me in the comments!

As you may have read in the New York Times last week, ferments are a culinary trend for 2013. I assume they meant 2013 BC, but you’ll have to read the article to be sure. Frankly, I don’t care if people explore fermentation because they like how fermented things taste, because they are curious about our relationship with microorganisms or because they want to improve their all-important gut bacteria. I’m just happy that this “trend” may bring our insane bacteriaphobia to a rapid halt.

To that end, I’ll be teaching a class on the basics of fermentation. We’ll definitely see how to make a few favorites: lacto-pickles, kombucha, kefir, sourdough and depending on time, we’ll try some kimchi, sauerkraut, vinegar and/or natural sodas. This will be a hands-on workshop. We’ll talk delicious bacteria, taste various ferments, make a couple things and everyone will leave with a culture or a ferment, but no promises on what you’ll end up with.

For now, please email me at Amanda@phickle.com to attend. I hate that Eventbrite fees cost me an extra attendee and you an extra 10%+, so we’re going the honor system here. Please know that if you don’t show up when you RSVP, you cost me $10 bucks. I’m not making any money from these classes, I’m just covering my costs, so please, please, please come if you say you will be there.

Indy Hall has been kind enough to let me host this class there! You do NOT need to be an Indy Hall member to attend, although being an Indy Hall member is awesome, so feel free to join if you want to!